From Laid-Off to Thriving Freelance Entrepreneur: Mashon's Nomad Life

How did Mashon Thomas transform from schoolteacher to a thriving freelance expert and entrepreneur living in Bali?

In this episode, Mashon talks us through her career shift and shares how you can navigate the chaotic world of freelancing. 

Connect with Mashon:

• Live Work Travel Community
• The Escape Hatch (freelancing course)
• Kitchen Table Founders

Connect with Anne:

• Leave a review or voice message at digitalnomadstories.co
• On instagram @annes_nomadstory
• Learn more about my business: The Podcast Babes

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

Hey nomads. Welcome to Digital Nomad Stories, the podcast. My name is Anne Klaassen and, together with my co-host, kendra Hasse, we interview digital nomads. Why? Because we want to share stories of how they did it. We talk about remote work, online business, location independency, freelancing, travel and, of course, the digital nomad lifestyle. Freelancing travel and, of course, the digital nomad lifestyle. Do you want to know more about us and access all previous episodes? Visit digitalnomadstoriesco. Alright, let's go into today's episode. Hey, hey, nomads. Welcome to a new episode. Today I'm here with Michonne Thomas. She is a freelance expert, entrepreneur, digital nomad, currently in Bali. I'm in Valencia, so we have a huge time difference, and I'm still always so excited to be, you know, on video with someone and on the other end of the world, I think it's you know, don't take it for granted, it's so cool. So, michonne, welcome to the show. I'm super excited to have you here today.

Speaker 2: 1:03

Thank you. I am very, very excited to be here. I know the time zone contributed to us having some scheduling back and forth, but I'm here, made it.

Speaker 1: 1:13

Yes, made it, yeah, and I'm so excited that we now get to share your story with our listeners. So, zakeka, can you tell us a little bit more about what you do, because I know that you have a bunch of different projects that you work on right? You're truly a multi-passionate, I think, looking at what you do. So can you share a little bit more about what work and life looks like for you at the moment?

Speaker 2: 1:36

Yes, definitely. Multi-passion is a really nice way of putting it. I haven't heard that one before, but I'm going to start to use it. But yes, my two main passions at the moment are my client work that I do. I run a business called Kitchen Table Founders and I've been doing this for the last six years, ever since I transitioned into freelancing and sort of accidentally stumbled my way into working with entrepreneurs Basically people who had started a business from home and as it started to grow they realized they need more people, they need help.

Speaker 2: 2:07

Everything seems to be on fire all the time. They're doing all the jobs in their business. They just they need help. And there's a book called Rocket Fuel by Gina Wickman and Mark C Winters that talks about entrepreneurs in the sense of a visionary usually the person who founds the company, and they need their person number two, their integrator, and just kind of accidentally found myself falling into that with working with a couple of entrepreneurs and they would say you know, I'm just so sick of putting out fires, I'm exhausted all the time, I just need someone who could help. And I jumped in and helped and found that I really have a passion for that, that early stage startup, absolute chaos, and so that was how I found long-term ongoing clients and just really settled into freelancing.

Speaker 2: 2:58

But the other passion of mine is liveworktravelcom, which I also run, and that is aimed at freelancers, because I used to be a middle school teacher and I found my way into freelancing at age 34, I think I was at the time and so I just have this incredible desire to share with others that this lifestyle is not impossible, that it's never too late, that freelancing can give you freedom, great income, the ability to, can give you, you know, freedom, great income, the ability to travel the world. I know there were some people who thought I was crazy when I walked away from my career at 30 and then took a couple of years to find my way finally into freelancing, but it has paid off in spades, and so I find myself really blessed to be able to work in that middle ground between, like, supporting my clients, the entrepreneurs, and then also supporting other people who want to do what I do, and really showing them how to freelance, how to find clients, how to if they want to, you know, up and move abroad like I do.

Speaker 1: 3:57

Yeah, exactly, that's awesome and yeah, I absolutely hear you. I think for the first two years of my nomad life, my dad kept asking when will you come home and find a quote, unquote real job.

Speaker 2: 4:11

Yes, yes, Love the term real job, various people, because, as I'm sure you found, as you go about and you meet people, you start to find these. You know we all have these different stories, but yet these similarities of just getting to those moments where you're just like I don't know, I don't want this life anymore, I want to try something different. And it doesn't usually like you don't have any a lot of other people in your life that share that, so you look like this crazy outlier, I think, for a while, until you make it. And for me I had. I was a middle school teacher for seven years and then it was 30 that I hit and kind of had that Groundhog Day moment of. Am I just going to do this forever until I come 60, 65, and then I'll retire and travel the world? Like, wait a minute.

Speaker 2: 5:01

I had studied abroad in Spain when I was in college and I had all these travel dreams that I'd sort of just put on hold to. You know, do what you're supposed to do like settle down, get a relationship. I had a house and a partner at the time, a career, all those things, and so to walk away from that was really wild. In hindsight, I still can't believe. I did it sometimes, but I understood the people around me looking going what are you doing? You know you're like you're leaving, everything is fine, but you're searching for something ridiculous. I don't understand this, you know, but it's just the more people I've talked to that have been through that as well. We're not crazy. There's something in us that makes us want to go after an alternative lifestyle.

Speaker 2: 5:45

And yeah, I hear you on the. You know the people who are wondering about the real jobs, the people who so what is it that you actually do again? And also the people who they kind of associate it with a gap year and like backpacking and like a temporary thing. And I'm like no, I I run several businesses. I've been doing this for a long time now. I make a lot more than I made when I was teaching. This is not a temporary thing. This is my new life?

Speaker 1: 6:12

Yeah, exactly, Absolutely. And I think you have a great point with what you said. You know, back home you had the house, the job, the partner and it was fine. And I love it when people say that it was fine, because the question that then comes up is like is that enough, right?

Speaker 1: 6:29

like it's fine enough. I think for everyone who comes here on the podcast, fine is not enough, because we want more and by sharing these stories, by sharing our stories, hopefully we can also then share that. You know there is a different option, like fine doesn't have to be enough, because this is real right, this lifestyle, like you said, it's not just a gap year. You don't have to quote, unquote, go home yeah, for sure you can. You can keep going. You can keep doing this because it can be sustainable if you, if you make sure to put in the effort to make it sustainable and grow a business or, you know, freelance, find clients, but you can make it sustainable for yourself. How did you go about finding your first freelance clients when you figured out, okay, freelancing is going to be it for me, how was that first stage of making that happen? It? It was awful.

Speaker 2: 7:24

It was terrible. And again, that's one of the reasons I started my community now, because I have. I want people to have support as they go through this. I want them to realize that it's not just like oh, piece of cake and then like everything falls into place, like there are some rough moments. I went back and looked later and it took me 35 days from the day I got laid off till the day I got my first client.

Speaker 2: 7:45

Because I had bounced around in those years since leaving teaching trying to find remote work and I finally found a remote company, thought that was the dream. I'm like cool, I'm on somebody's payroll and I get to work remotely. And then I got laid off from that job. So it was like, oh wow, this is a real kick in the pants to do my own thing. And after that layoff, I mean it was brutal. You have the shock of a layoff. You have the just panic and anxiety and the gut-wrenching oh my god, what am I going to do now? I panicked almost every day with like, do I just go get a job or do I keep trying to do this? Do I go get a job? You know a lot of that back and forth.

Speaker 2: 8:20

But so there's two things that I did. The first one I went on Upwork, the freelance platform that many, many more people have heard of now than back in 2017. And I started looking for clients and pitching clients and I did not have a lot of success at first, which is not the answer that anyone wants to hear, but there's so many people on the platform I checked the other day and it's like something like 18 million Like you've got to be good with your pitches, and so I organized a system where I would just pitch and then refine and each time try to be tweaking it, trying to customize it. And now that I'm a client myself and I hire tons of freelancers, I see all this generic stuff that people just throw out, you know, hoping, and it just doesn't work. So over time I got really good at customizing my pitches, really speaking to the person on the other end of that as a person, not just this generic copy and paste thing that a lot of people do. But still it was daunting and I felt like I was very much back in the job hunting world, where you go to a job board and you submit your resume and just hope for the best, and I decided, wait a minute, let me go find business owners where they are and just like, show up and be like I can help you.

Speaker 2: 9:35

So forums, social media, anywhere that I could identify that business owners were hanging out like business owners have groups and memberships and they get together and they hang out in places. So I would join things like that and find people that needed my services and really all it took was that click to go directly to clients who need you. Show them how you're going to be able to help them. In my case, it's magic, right, it's like I'm your right-hand person. You can throw anything at me and I'll figure out how to get it done. Like who doesn't want someone like that? Right, it's a pretty easy, easy pitch.

Speaker 2: 10:10

So it took that me figuring out to go directly to them. I think I sent nine pitches at first and I got six replies and I was like whoa, something is happening here. I think I just found this little, this little magic, this little magic spot where you know I can really really just go with this. And that's the thing that I really try and work on with my students right now. I try to give them the confidence because I remember those early days, like the biggest hurdle that I had to climb was myself. I knew that I could figure anything out. I knew that I was tough and brave and that I kept going and I'd walked away from you know my whole life and I was gonna make something happen, but it was. It was just that the imposter syndrome it's. That's the thing, and so I want people to feel supported as they go through this.

Speaker 1: 11:00

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, thank you for sharing that. It was tough Because you know, we always hear the success stories and we hear where you are now and you know that business is going well and you're in Bali and life looks great. But it is also tough and I think it's always so interesting. You know, it took you 35 days to find your first client and 35 days when you're in it it feels like eternity, right, like it feels like the longest 35 days. When you're in it it feels like eternity, right, like it feels like the longest 35 days of your life. But then now, looking back, you know, years later, 35 days not that much time, right?

Speaker 2: 11:35

actually it's not that much time, and that's why I was glad I went back and checked it because, yeah, you're right, while I was in it felt like hell and it felt like years. It was absolutely so miserable. But is it and this is the kind of thing that you know, like you said, when people go after a life that's more than just fine, it's like is it worth it to put in the misery for those that month or two months in order to reap what's on the other side? And it's so funny the way we look at it too. Like technically it wasn't that bad and I you know air quotes no one was like beating me, no one was harassing me. No, like it was just me versus my brain, every single day sitting down at a computer trying to win against my brain. It wasn't like I was fighting a war or some people have so many physical and real threats in their life. This was just the misery of the unknown and it was really hard to get comfortable with the uncomfortable. And that's the thing, too, that I want your audience to know and, as so many people know, and this is why I'm passionate about you know what we do and sharing stories. For me at least, it's still not gone away. It's still not gone away. Like there's still imposter syndrome.

Speaker 2: 12:52

The reason I'm in Bali is one of my operations manager for Live Work Travel. Actually, she lives in Jakarta, so she flew over. Last week we had our first company retreat and it was so nice to meet face to face and she is 24. And she's been working with me for almost a year now and we just haven't seen these conversations and I'm like I'm scared, I'm nervous about like some of these new things that we're doing in our business. And she's looking at me like what are you talking about? If I were you, I wouldn't be scared, like if I were you and I'd done all the things.

Speaker 2: 13:19

And I'm like it doesn't go away though. Like change is uncomfortable, new things are uncomfortable and for me, if I'm sitting down next to someone having a conversation talking about their business and what I can do for them, I feel like a million bucks. I'm just in my zone, but still getting ready to pitch someone new, even though I know I'm good at what I do. Oh, it's terrible. So I think that that is good for people to hear too. You know I've had it up to here with you know, perfection on Instagram and stuff and socials and stuff. They can be a wonderful tool for sharing. But like we've got to talk about and show the messy parts too and be able to admit like I can be really damn good at what I do and also scared on the inside at the same time, you know.

Speaker 1: 14:09

Yeah, yeah, exactly it's what you said getting uncomfortable and being okay with being uncomfortable, because it is only for a little while. And then I mean, yes, it comes and goes. I absolutely have the same still years into my business. It is freaking uncomfortable sometimes. I think what really helped me was just telling myself like I will make this work. You know, I don't know when and exactly how, but I'll make it work one way or another. And I think that was also what made for me, at least that first stage. You know, finding that first client so uncomfortable because I didn't know if it was going to work, you know. So sometimes I was like, oh, I'll find someone, I'll find one person who wants to pay me for what I do, right, and then, or maybe I won't, you know. So I think that's it, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 15:05

I'm guessing, though, deep, deep down, looking back, you still kind of knew you were going to make it, maybe Because I had the same thing I remember being. When I look back, I'm like why was I so stressed out and anxious? Like I had already said to myself, I was going to do this and it was a thing that didn't go away for years, like in sense of like finding a way to work remotely and travel the world. So it is funny, like we set our mind to do something and then we doubt ourselves all along the way back and forth, in this little up and down, up and down, up and down. But yeah, it's so difficult yet simple. I think it's something we all struggle with, that up and down part. Yet that is a part of life, of everything. Like I know when I'm getting ready to do something big, because it's scary. I know when I'm getting ready to, you know, make some kind of leap to the next level, because it's scary, and I find myself always wishing for oh my gosh, why can't it just be easy?

Speaker 1: 16:04

But like I don't know, it's just that, that's that's the little hurdle that we have to get over to to get to growth. It's simple but not easy.

Speaker 2: 16:14

Right, right, there's this book called Mastery that I read and reread every now and then. I think it's by George, someone I can't remember the last name, I'm really bad at that with books and stuff but he talks about just like, the journey to master something and how long it takes, and every time I can feel myself getting impatient about kind of anything in life. I sit down and I read that again Because it's just really focusing on the steps and the journey and just getting you Like we all just walk in and it's like we take one lesson at something, like I want to be good at this and it's just like. No, it takes years, you know, you think of athletes and all of the days that you don't see in the gym, the training, the food that they eat, everything they put into that. And I kind, when I talk to my students, want them to apply that to trying to go out and find freelance clients, because it doesn't happen on day one, typically, unless you know somebody, you've got a great hookup, but like or day two or day three, like it sucks. But I can't help people unless they have that mentality that you mentioned, that you had and the one that I had at the beginning too, like I don't know how, but I'm going to figure this out, just just that is that is all I know and that's all I need to know. And all these years later, it's led me to where I am now and the reason that I I really want to talk to people, want to share, want to want people, this is because, for me at least, it goes against everything I was taught growing up.

Speaker 2: 17:51

And you know, I grew up in Columbus, ohio. Very just, you know, you got to work hard, you got to get a good job, you got to get a college degree, you know, and then you just settle down and you work and my you know my parents' generation. You didn't jump around jobs like we do now. You kind of go to a company, you stay there for years and that's never appealed to me. Like you said, I'm a multi-passionate person and so that was supposed to be the path to stability, to a good retirement, to all the things, and it was walking away, you know, hard left from everything that was told to me that led me to a life that I enjoy, work that I enjoy, working with amazing people that I enjoy and really good money, like I know that different cultures have different views when we're talking about money.

Speaker 2: 18:46

I'm from the States where we talk about money, but people tend to associate freelancing with instability and a lack of money and clients and all those things.

Speaker 2: 18:58

And in my first year I almost earned it was just under six figures which blew my mind as a teacher for seven years and growing up in an environment where I thought you had to be a doctor or a lawyer or you know some kind of really fancy job, and so that blew my mind and I wanted to shout it from the rooftops. And I still just want to share with people like, even if that is not their goal, if they would be happy with a third of that, like on the side or something or half of that, or just want to freelance a little bit here and there and an extra two grand a month one grand a month would help them out. I feel like people need to know about this because unfortunately there's still so much in that old school you know you can have fun when you're 65 and retire kind of attitude that I think is so sad, because none of us are guaranteed to make it right 100%.

Speaker 1: 19:55

I mean it would be such a shame that you wait until retirement to travel and then maybe you can't you know physically travel anymore. You know, you don't know what's going to happen. So while you were looking for clients, were you already traveling while you had that remote job and then got laid off, or were you still kind of at home and trying to figure that out first before you started traveling? Can you share a little bit more about that?

Speaker 2: 20:21

Yes, I was at home and I think for a lot of people worse than at home, I was at my parents' home.

Speaker 2: 20:27

Life, you know, again sharing these stories, it doesn't always look like we thought it was going to. I ended up back at my parents at what like 33 for almost a year and I had kind of moved there and chucked a bunch of my stuff. And then I was out traveling while I had that remote job, but just domestically in the US at that time, so taking a lot of US trips. And as soon as that layoff hit I came back home and was like OK, I've got to get serious. So I was at my parents' house and I was so broke I was broker than broke Between credit card, student loans and my car payment being like upside down because I owed more on it. I was like $30,000 in debt. So I was just like this is really bad. This is really bad. So thankfully I was. You know my parents have a spare bedroom. I would like work all day and then like make them dinner when they came home and work all day, make them dinner and be so freaked out of like I can't believe this is my life, like this is not how 33 was supposed to look. So once I got my first clients and they started getting really excited for me because, like the third or fourth client I landed was more of like an hourly wage than I ever thought I would be earning. So it was just like you know, being able to tell my dad and he's like wait, what, how much? Like that's fantastic. So I stayed with them for October-ish that I really started getting like some solid clients and I left that November and moved to, or December and moved to Vegas.

Speaker 2: 22:01

So I'd always wanted to live out west and I knew it would be temporary because I really wanted to move abroad. But I was just like I'm feeling stable, I just paid down a bunch of debt, like money's coming in, this is feeling really good. This is going to be my like trial run. You know, let me move, move to Vegas. And you know I'd lived far away before. I'm from Ohio but I'd spent most of my adult life in Florida, so I had no stranger to cross country moves.

Speaker 2: 22:29

But yeah, I moved to Vegas and that was actually really good for my career. Because, again, you talk about sacrifice, like people don't necessarily understand, like the discomfort, the sacrifice, the hard work that goes into building something. And by moving to Vegas where I knew no one, I was able to be a little bit of a hermit, like I did meet people and I had like three friends while I was there, but it was easy to say no because they were like new friends, right, it was like no, I'm just gonna put my head down and I would do 10, 12, sometimes 15 hour days sometimes and it's just like I can sleep all weekend. But that allowed me to really focus on the building, my business part. And after a year in Vegas to the day, literally I didn't plan it that way, but a year later I moved to Columbia.

Speaker 1: 23:21

And that started all of my travels. Awesome, that's really interesting that you kind of found a way to just put your head down, get everything done for your business, really build it. And then how was that? When you moved abroad, were you like, was your business more stable and could you work less and be a little bit more social and enjoy your travels, or were you still working those really really long days?

Speaker 2: 23:41

Good question. No, my, I was able to flex way back because I wanted to enjoy my life. I think that the first year yeah, it was, it was, it was really important. And people ask me, they're like, do you think I should quit my job and just go into this? And I'm like I can't tell you that. But I will say that getting laid off of my job made me figure things out very quickly. Right, you're just like under this pressure cooker. I wouldn't, you know, wish that on anybody. But if it happens, like I say, take it and use it and grow as fast as you can.

Speaker 2: 24:10

But yeah, by the time I moved to Columbia, it was weird, right, because my whole life I'd had this attitude or this mindset of just like scarcity and like there's just never enough money from moving out and getting my you know, getting my first job at 15 and moving out and going to college and then working all through college and all the. You always needed money. And so it was weird to, after one year of freelancing, I've paid off all my debt. New checks come in and it's just like, oh, I guess retirement like a grownup, like I don't know how to, I don't know how to be a grownup. This is weird. So I was able to just back off the freelancing work quite a bit. I scaled down to 20 hours a week. I enrolled in Spanish classes, I went out with friends. I just kind of reduced my workload.

Speaker 2: 25:00

And that's one of my favorite things about freelancing running my own business, I can go up and down as needed and I do modify my work based on where I'm living and what's going on.

Speaker 2: 25:08

So if I move to somewhere where it's cold and I don't really want to go out much because I hate the cold and it's like boom, all right, this is work time. Like I'll work a lot of hours, I'll just stay in, I'll be cozy at home, I'll get a lot of work done. If I'm somewhere it's beachy and tropical, I don't want to work, I want to be out by the pool, I want to hang out. So I flex my, my work schedule depending on where I am and what I'm doing, and that's been really helpful over the years. As life happens and you know, family stuff goes on, friend stuff goes on, all kinds of things go on in your personal life, and being able to just reduce the amount of work that you're doing is really nice. It's that balance that people always talk about, but then we don't ever get when you're working for someone else. Really.

Speaker 1: 25:49

Yeah, absolutely. So how do you do that with clients, though? Because I think this sounds amazing, but I also know of a lot of freelancers who want to do this, but then, once they're working with clients, they don't really want to say no to clients, or they don't take any vacations, even though you know they could, but when they take vacations, they don't get paid. So we're like, oh, I don't want to, or you know like that's also a struggle for a lot of freelancers. So how did you handle that, so that you could actually scale up and down as you wanted and take the time to enjoy your life in those places where you didn't want to work much?

Speaker 2: 26:27

Yeah, so one thing about that with people people not wanting to take vacation which I totally understand, because if you take vacation, about that with people not wanting to take vacation which I totally understand, because if you take vacation you're not getting paid is to set your hourly rate ahead of time, to factor that in, so maybe depending on how many clients you have sitting down and doing the math on how much you need to make and working in your vacation time with that, and then, okay, this is my hourly rate and I'm going to make this much and I can take up to this much vacation time in a year time off, unpaid. So which I did the math on this. It's one of the things I talk about all the time, but I have this weird feeling I'm going to mess it up right now, but I think so, working like 30 hours a week for nine months a year, that's, you need to be making $70 an hour to make a hundred grand in a year with three months off and only working 30 hours a week. So for everyone listening, check my math, because I don't know the numbers in front of me, but I think that's the number that I quote. It's less than you would think right, it's less than you would think. So setting your hourly rate is factor in vacation with that.

Speaker 2: 27:25

Now, as far as how I do it, I have always done this from day one accidentally, I think it was probably because I came into freelancing at age 34, 35, and I was tired of like taking other people's shit. Frankly, you know lots of difficult bosses over the years, difficult jobs, difficult whatever it was like. Wait a minute. I just realized early on from day one, like I'm a business, so I get to set my own rules. The client is a business as well. If they don't like my rules, then we can agree to disagree, we can come to compromises, or they can go work with someone else, or I can go work with someone else. And this is one of the main things that I would love for your audience to take away, because I see so many freelancers who have made themselves small in order to cater to the client and I don't like seeing that happen. The freelancer is a business and the client is a business. Maybe if someone does this for the first few clients just to get their foot in the door. But it's really important to do whatever they can. Surround yourself with other people. But you've got to break away from that mindset because that is how you get freedom in your business.

Speaker 2: 28:28

I see people who don't want to move to different time zones, who don't want to take time off, and I've never operated that way. I tell my clients I'm going to be off in two weeks. I put the calendar invite in your thing, so you know. I've never asked a client for vacation, I'm away. I never asked them to switch time zones.

Speaker 2: 28:45

Right now I'm working from Bali. I'm 12 hours difference with my clients in the East Coast, but from day one. Also, I've set up my business to have as few meetings as possible. So if necessary, I will get up in the middle of the night. But I'm only here in Bali for a couple of weeks. I'm only on this side of the world for a short while and then I'll go back to my comfort zone, which is Europe.

Speaker 2: 29:07

But I don't really ever, you know, ask my clients for stuff. I just lay out what's going on. I do think that's a bit easier in my line of work, in the sense that I do operations for the client. So I look at it as you shouldn't even know that I'm gone, because that's how well, I'm doing my job, like I'll have set up everything to be taken care of in my absence Otherwise I wouldn't go on vacation, right. But the team knows who to report to. They know what to do. They know like the way that I step into my clients' companies is that they don't have to think about operations. I handle it and so I also handle. You know me going on vacation, so like it does work out a bit in mine.

Speaker 2: 29:53

But for other people who aren't necessarily as in their clients' businesses as me, I encourage them to just do the same. Take a look at okay, if I'm gone for a week, how does that affect the client? How can I do everything I can to mitigate that, help that bothering them? Right? Do you owe something? Can you turn it in early? Is it going to hold something else up? Well, can you get that done early? Is there a meeting that's a weekly meeting, that's scheduled? Can you just lay out everything you need to add to that agenda and have someone else take care of it, or can you reschedule for later?

Speaker 2: 30:25

Like I see this a lot. We're so scared to ask instead of just kind of going for it. And I mean, I have a longstanding client so I know his schedule, I know how his brain works, I know it's better to get him at the end of the day because I don't want to take up time at the beginning of his day when he needs to focus and get deep work done. So I scheduled a call with him for like four in the morning two days from now and he saw that and he's like no, aren't you still in Bali? It's fine, I can meet at 8pm, right Like his time, so I can at least be in my morning. So like I wouldn't have asked that. It's my choice to be over here and he's someone I've known for ages and I'm happy to get up one day at four o'clock in the morning.

Speaker 2: 31:03

But it was also really great of him to move it. So we never really know and yeah, I just so important to get that relationship established from the beginning that like you are a, a business, you are not there to be. I see this too often like clients just like run roughshod over freelancers. But they are a business as well and they can. They can put up their own terms and they can organize things on there. I think the main thing is, like many people, we come to freelancing from a nine-to-five, so we're used to having a boss and we're used to having to jump through all these hoops and request time off two weeks in advance, and just all these things that don't need to be that thing.

Speaker 1: 31:42

Yeah, that's very true. I think it's a big mindset shift that needs to happen when you're a freelancer, because otherwise you will be a slightly better paid employee and you'll still have to ask for permission at all times, and it doesn't have to be that way. That's definitely what your story shows us today, michelle. What's your best tip for people who want to go into freelancing and probably also want to become a digital nomad? Because it's by listening to this podcast? What's your number one advice that you can share today, or maybe number one thing you learned in the past years of freelancing and traveling?

Speaker 2: 32:23

oh, wow, um. So the the number one advice, especially if you want to become a digital nomad, is one that was given to me by a friend of mine, actually who had been doing this lifestyle for nine years. He said buy the, buy the ticket. He said buy the ticket. And I did. I bought my ticket six months before I left the country. I was just like, all right, one-way ticket, and I bought it. And then, planning backward from there, everything else fell into place, right. You don't know how many gazillion things you've got to do when you move abroad, and but I had a, I had a date and I had a ticket right. And so, even if someone is not sure that they can do it, you know right away buy your ticket for a year out, buy it for 18, I don't know how long the airlines let you do but buy the ticket and you'll start to sort everything out from there.

Speaker 2: 33:11

As far as just like the best of the tips for like getting into freelancing, it's a similar but like again the mindset of just I'm going to do this and I mine, when I started, was I'm going to find a way to work remotely and travel the world. I didn't know that it would be freelancing. I thought it would be for a nine to five company, you know. But that was my goal, that was my dream, and I remember walking into my apartment in Medellin, colombia, and walking out onto the balcony of that first place that I rented and going oh my God, like this is wild. I've done it. I've done it. This is crazy. So again, just setting that mindset If someone wants to get into freelancing, decide, you're going to do it. No back and forth, no wishy-washy, I'm going to do it. I'm going to start freelancing period. Then everything is going to start to move and to fall into place. You know you're going to start freelancing.

Speaker 2: 34:11

Suddenly, your end of day shifts away from Netflix every day or whatever you're doing, and you start to hmm, I'm going to go online for an hour. I'm going to figure out what other people are doing. I'm going to join communities and groups and talk to other people and figure out what they're doing, because I remember that from back in it. I was so hungry and this was like a couple of years before I walked away from everything, maybe like 2013, 14. I was, if I even like nobody was working remotely back then, but if I heard of someone. It was like this phantom, legendary thing. It was like a girl who knows a girl who knows a girl in my office works remotely and I'd be like what do you do, you know, just to talk to people.

Speaker 2: 34:49

There's so many of us out here that want to share, that want to provide help and support along the way. Like, make that decision that you're going to start freelancing and just watch how things open up, how connections come to you, how you find out information. It's just all going to go off from there. But it is that mindset because I've worked with so many people over the years and I can tell really early on whether they're going to make it or not, because some have that fire and they've made that decision and others are sort of just still deciding, still wishy-washy, still haven't haven't quite made up their mind yet, and it's, it's not. I can't make it, there's no trying, yeah yeah, there's no trying freelancing, no, oh.

Speaker 2: 35:31

Oh, you wouldn't. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure, I agree with that.

Speaker 1: 35:35

I think that's great advice. That is really really good advice. Michelle, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Can you tell us where people can find you online?

Speaker 2: 35:43

Yes, all the handles. So for my client facing business Kitchen Table Founders, you can find me at kitchentablefounderscom and on Instagram at kitchentablefounders For Live Work Travel. My community for freelancers, you can find us at communityliveworktravelcom and on Instagram at liveworktravelig.

Speaker 1: 36:07

Awesome. We'll also add all the links to the show notes so you can go there. Yeah, follow Mashon, see where she's going. Next, all the freelancing tips I'm sure you can find them on instagram and on the website. Thank you again for coming on the show today. It was really good to get all your tips and tricks for freelancing. I know a lot of a lot. A lot of people are interested in it and also a lot of people are not sure where to start, so I think this has been a great, great episode for people who will now decide.

Speaker 1: 36:37

Hopefully yes and not to try it out amazing yeah, thank you so much for being here today thank you.

Speaker 2: 36:44

This has been amazing. I've had so much fun and that's it for today.

Speaker 1: 36:50

Thank you so much for listening. I appreciate, appreciate it very, very much. I would appreciate it even more if you could leave a review on Apple Podcasts for me. That way, more people can find this podcast, more people can hear the inspiring stories that we're sharing, and the more people we can impact for the better. So, thank you so much if you are going to leave a review. I really appreciate you and I will see you in the next episode.